An approach for Web service selection based on confidence level of decision maker

Web services today are among the most widely used groups for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Service selection is one of the most significant current discussions in SOA, which evaluates discovered services and chooses the best candidate from them. Although a majority of service selection techniques apply Quality of Service (QoS), the behaviour of QoS-based service selection leads to service selection problems in Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). In the existing works, the confidence level of decision makers is neglected and does not consider their expertise in assessing Web services. In this paper, we employ the VIKOR (VIšekriterijumskoKOmpromisnoRangiranje) method, which is absent in the literature for service selection, but is well-known in other research. We propose a QoS-based approach that deals with service selection by applying VIKOR with improvement of features. This research determines the weights of criteria based on user preference and accounts for the confidence level of decision makers. The proposed approach is illustrated by an example in order to demonstrate and validate the model. The results of this research may facilitate service consumers to attain a more efficient decision when selecting the appropriate service.